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Sunday, 10 April 2016

Prosody, hearing and emotions

In the paper “Auditory
event structure and speech”, Fred Cummins illustrate types of event structures
suggesting that being familiar with them could motivate their phonologization
into familiar structures. In his words – “This work is an initial attempt to move
the discussion of speech prosody towards a grounding in auditory ecology.”.
Reading the article took me to a completely different direction. Thinking about
the many people who focus on speech and language. From acquisition to proper
and folk usage of it, why is speech so special? What is it about hearing that fascinates
us?

As the
article continues on auditory systems and recognizing events I could not stop
thinking about sound tracks and scary movies when we can “feel” what the movie
wants us to feel just by listening to the sounds. Growing up with sound tracks
like the ones from “jaws”, “psycho” and “the shinning” I still have goosebumps
when I hear one of those sounds. Reading about how sounds can combining to
belong as a single event made me realize how many sounds could combine to
characterize moments that are important to us and will be remembered in a certain
way, specially reading about the example of bouncing and breaking sounds. Is it
the same hear a glass breaking during breakfast or your mother’s glass of water
breaking while she collapses on the floor?

While going
through an emotional event your senses might no “work” properly, some people
even say they don’t work at all. Moments so full of emotions that the only
sound you can hear is your own heartbeat. That is when I came back to the idea
of learners. Isn’t learning an emotional rollercoaster? There is excitement
with the new and interesting world of knowledge, also frustration with
something we don’t quite understand, nervousness to learn something considered
important, and so on. One important point on the article is that perceiving an
event is stronger than disconnected sounds, multiple sounds will be considered
as a single event and those are more likely to have a more important source.

The article reminded me of things
completely disconnected to its purpose and I could not stop thinking of the
effects of being an emotional being in that whole mixture. After all, if we are
considering the event structure we have to consider the entire human system
with all its facets. Emotions are not part of the auditory system, but it can
probably affect perception. Perceiving an event clearly evolves around the
perceiver and his state of mind in that moment might be of some importance.